


C053773

by RevocablePeril (PerihelionIcarus)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Courf is also there sort of, F/F, You'll see what I mean, for the bishop myriel fundraiser, this was so much fun to write thank you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:33:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24719830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerihelionIcarus/pseuds/RevocablePeril
Summary: Based on a prompt. Marius is an engineer, and Éponine is the mechanic he's hired to build the perfect woman android. Things don't exactly go as either of them planned.
Relationships: Cosette Fauchelevent/Éponine Thénardier
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29





	C053773

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merelydovely](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merelydovely/gifts).



> The wonderful artwork is by [Delfi](https://delfi.artstation.com/)!

Marius, like most people in his profession, has had some out-there, stupid, questionably legal, and sometimes just bad ideas. There’s a very fine line between engineer and mad scientist, after all. But this one, Éponine thinks, is the first idea that ticks all four of those boxes. He’s still talking, but she’s stopped listening at this point, instead rooting through her own brain for something that might have got him so unhinged.

“An android,” she says, deadpan, cutting him off mid-rant. “You want. Me to build you. An android?”

“Please?” Marius asks, in a tiny voice.

“It’s not super legal,” she says.

“You have one,” he replies.

“That’s my assistant. He’s not programmed with choices.”

“I’ve got the money. I’m designing the AI, I just need you to build the shell. Please.”

Éponine crosses her arms and considers a moment. Marius _is_ a rich kid. She _could_ use the cash. They may be friends, but she still has to live. Any AI work could keep her afloat for a couple months at least, and longer even than that if she counts the this-is-pretty-illegal hazard pay. Besides, like the rest of Marius’ stupid ideas, it sounds pretty fun. Not that she’d tell him that.

“Why?” she asks, even though she knows she’s about to accept.

“I’m rather lonely,” Marius admits.

“There are dolls for that.”

Marius flushes red. “I want to talk to someone, ‘Ponine. A woman who I can’t. Er. Who won’t care when I make a fool of myself. I don’t want anything...crass.”

Éponine decides to let this slide, because he absolutely does. “Fine,” she says, and Marius looks visibly relieved. She names her price. “Transfer me the credits, send me the physical specs, age, whatever. Name your flaws. I start tomorrow, but after the shell is done we work together.”

Marius grins, bounds over to her, and wraps her in a hug. “Thank you,” he says, just as she starts to wonder what the fuck she got herself into.

\--

Éponine stares at the interface she’s set up, at Marius’ messages on her phone, and back again.

 _The perfect woman_ is all he’d texted, along with a picture of the credit transfer receipt.

 _And..._ she’d texted back, cringing a bit at his wording. _What’s perfect?_

_Someone nice. With a pretty laugh. My age I guess_

_Anything specific, physically? Like at all?_

_You know my type_

And Éponine _does_ know his type, unfortunately, because he can’t ever keep his eyes off them whenever one of them walks past. It’s kind of a problem, actually, and maybe it’s for the best that he’ll have someone to ogle that isn’t some poor stranger.

It seemed like enough instruction at the time, but now she’s in front of her interface with all the minute bone, cartilage, skin, and hair details it takes to create even the illusion of a whole human, and she wishes she’d gotten more of a description than “someone nice”. She flips the interface shut and turns on her printers. Bones first. It’s pretty hard to fuck up bones.

On week one, she lays down the bones and polymer muscle, stretches false tendons, winds oil tubes around the joints, and prints what feels like a kilometre of skin samples. It has to be soft enough to touch and strong enough not to tear. If an enforcement officer clocks it as fake, she’ll be out more than just a job. She settles on one by Friday night. She starts up her AI assistant, because it’s late as hell, she’s covered in silicon and joint oil, and if she’s honest could use the company.

“Courf,” she says, handing him the sample as the eyelid shutters flick open. “Lay this base for me, would you?”

“Of course,” he says, without feeling, and Éponine thinks for a second that maybe it would be nice to get Marius to program him a personality, if not just for someone to talk to.

She works a little while on modelling the head on her digital interface while Courf putters around the workshop with scalpels and sealants. In her head is a sea of faces of nameless women, ones she’s watched Marius stare at, and one she’s stared at right along with him. The 3D model gets high cheekbones. Full lips. Curly hair, brown eyes. Freckles, later, she muses. She sets the model to print, mumbles something about its assembly to her assistant, and drifts off to sleep right at her desk.

She’s greeted in the morning by a skin-on (and therefore stark naked), completely unmoving android shell, leaned up against the back wall of her workshop, and Courfeyrac sitting blankly beside it.

“Sleep,” she says to him, and he powers down and shutters his eyes.

She strides over to the new shell and runs her fingers along its collarbones. She tests the folding of the finger joints. Confirms the softness of the lower lip with her thumb. Examines each eye under a light. The pupils don’t dilate, and never will.

She takes a step back to examine her and her assistant’s work. She instantly remembers that she and Marius have the same taste, because this shell is very, very pretty.

“Well, shit,” she says, to no one.

\--

Marius arrives the next week, once Éponine has had the chance to install a basic motor system so the shell can move on her own. She throws one of her old pairs of coveralls over her beforehand, and tries not to think about how adorable she looks.

“She’s _beautiful_ ,” Marius gasps, the moment he walks through the door.

Éponine grins. “She is, isn’t she?”

He walks over to her and begins his walkaround inspection. “You’ve _outdone_ yourself, ‘Ponine. I. Uh. Does she have a name?”

She shrugs. “Nah, not yet. Couldn’t think of one good enough. Can’t you, like, program her to decide her own or something?”

“Maybe,” Marius says, but he’s distracted. He gently lifts an arm, testing its rotation. He runs a thumb along a collarbone, just like Éponine had the week before.

It’s a bit strange to watch. “How exactly do you want to do this?” she asks.

“Oh yeah, I did some programming,” says Marius. He strides back to her and fishes a laptop out of a bag. He opens it and scrolls through lines and lines of seven-character codes she doesn’t understand a bit. “It should work, I think? I can’t know until we test it.”

“What’s this one do?” she asks, pointing to a line of numbers at random. Lf0e68c.

He highlights it; reads his own notes. “Er, blink frequency.”

He scrolls down some more. She points again: C053773. “This one?”

“Her laugh,” Marius says.

She snorts. “Alright, let’s plug her in. See what you got.”

Éponine wakes up Courf and passes a series of wires to him, who slides them into precise locations under the android’s open headpiece. Marius rambles about his programming method, while she only half-listens. She gathers that he’s mapped the near-obsolete HTML colour codes onto particular elements.

“Like on this one, 053773 controls for laugh and C is the type,” Marius explains.

“Uh-huh. How many outcomes?” she asks.

“26. One per letter.”

She hums. “Courf, do you have the voice center plugged in?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Alright, let’s test that one. Marius?”

Marius fiddles around on the laptop for a second, and looks up. The android smiles, opens her mouth, and laughs.

Éponine and Marius both freeze. The android laughs again.

It’s almost like music. High, pretty, eerily human.

“Whoa,” Marius says, as she comes to stand behind him.

She watches him adjust the code to D053773, and triggers the laugh again. It’s still pretty, but not nearly the same. He switches it back.

“Jesus Christ,” Éponine mutters. She could listen to that all day. She stares at the C053773 on Marius’ screen. “How did you do that?”

Marius looks as surprised as she is. “I-I didn’t even touch this part yet. I randomized it.”

She squints. It looks like a word, almost. C053773.

“Cosette,” she reads.

“What?” asks Marius.

“That’s her name. Cosette.”

\--

They work on Cosette for the next three weeks. Éponine gives Marius the full run of her workshop, as well as the use of Courfeyrac, who he’s taken quite a shine to, despite the assistant not having any semblance of a personality. Marius makes the creative decisions (she is his android, after all, she thinks with a twinge of something that’s not quite jealousy), though he does ask for her input rather often. Are Cosette’s steps big enough? When she crouches down, does it look natural? Does she tuck her hair behind her ears too much? She finds herself at a loss to answer most of the time, but makes an executive decision anyway, because, well. That’s her job.

She comes back from a lunch run one day, and as she enters the workshop Cosette turns her head around, lifts her arm to wave (a bit awkwardly, they should work on that), and smiles, bright and wide. “Hello, Éponine,” Cosette says. “You look beautiful in that outfit.”

And god, Éponine knows she doesn’t mean it, because she _can’t_ , and because the outfit in question is a white tank top and ratty old jeans, but that doesn’t stop her hands from shaking and her heart from beating wildly for the rest of the day.

She researches colour codes that evening, after Marius has gone home and Cosette has been switched off for the night, wires trailing from her head. She learns there’s over 16 million specific hues, and briefly wonders if that means Marius has programmed that many elements into the design. She wouldn’t put it past him, honestly. 053773 is a shade of deep blue, like the colour of the open ocean in nature documentaries or the sky at the tail end of magic hour.

“This colour would look so good on you,” she sighs to Cosette, who’s still dressed in the old coveralls she put her in weeks ago.

Cosette doesn’t answer.

Éponine buys a dress she sees in a window on the way to the workshop the next day. It’s not quite shade 053773, but it’s pretty close. It’s got puffy sleeves and little flowers printed all over it. Not something she’d ever wear herself, but she figures it’ll look good on Cosette.

Marius won’t be in for a couple of hours, yet. She debates on switching Cosette on early. She won’t mess with anything, she tells herself, and besides, she needs to get this dress on somehow. She does it.

“Good morning,” Cosette greets her, the second her eyes open.

“Morning,” Éponine says, examining her movements. All good. “I got you something.”  
She hands Cosette the balled-up dress, and watches as she unfurls it in front of her.

“Oh, it’s _beautiful_ ,” Cosette says.

Éponine really likes the way that word sounds when she says it. “Do you like it?” she asks. “Is that, er, a thing you can do yet? I don’t keep track of what bits Marius messes around with.”

Cosette looks at her, bemused (that’s a very specific emotion to capture, Éponine thinks, and she’ll have to compliment Marius on it later). “I can enjoy things, yes. For example, I quite enjoy your company.”

Éponine laughs. “You might change your mind when you meet more people.”

Cosette _tsks_ at her. “I’ll have you know I was programmed to have good taste.”

Éponine can’t think of anything to say to that. “Do you want to try putting on the dress yourself? I know we haven’t tested changing yet, but--”

“I can handle it,” Cosette says, determined. “Or I’ll figure it out.”

“Okay. I’m right here if you need me.”

Facing her, Cosette unhooks the clasps on the coveralls and lets them fall to the ground. Éponine averts her eyes. She knows she doesn’t have to, but it feels different from when Cosette was just an the empty shell. She catches a glimpse anyway, and flushes, because. Well. God, Cosette is pretty.

“I think I did it!” Cosette says.

Éponine looks back up. The dress is on, but backwards. She laughs. “Almost,” she says. She shows Cosette the tag that’s currently sitting between her collarbones. “This thing goes in the back.”

Cosette pouts while she fixes her mistake, and it’s adorable. She smoothes the front of the dress down her legs and looks at Éponine expectantly.

Éponine takes a step back and admires the look on her. “You look perfect,” she says, and Cosette beams.

Later, when Marius comes in, his jaw drops at the new dress.

“That,” Marius says. “Wow. That looks beautiful on you.”

And Cosette does smile, but it doesn’t seem as big as before. (Of course, Éponine is probably just imagining things.)

\--

“I think we need to take you outside, today,” Éponine says to Cosette, at the beginning of week four. Marius is typing away furiously, Courf looking at his work expressionless. Éponine fiddles with a setting for Cosette’s grip strength.

Marius starts. “Really? Do you think she’s ready?”

“Dunno. Do you think you’re ready, Cosette?”

“I trust you,” Cosette says. “If you think so, I must be. And I have to say, by now I’m quite curious about what’s out there.”

She points at the workshop door. A stray hair falls in Cosette’s face. She tucks it behind her ear, gently. It’s natural.

Éponine hums. She slides her hand into Cosette’s, and tries not to think about how soft it is. She’s a professional, dammit. “Squeeze,” she says.

“Sure,” Cosette squeezes her hand, and smiles at her. Éponine can’t help herself, she smiles back.

“Grip strength perfect,” she says. “We’re good to go.”

“Where to?” asks Marius.

“The park, maybe?” Éponine says. Cosette still hasn’t let go of her hand. “It’s not too crowded, so if anything happens we’ll be alright.”

“A park,” says Cosette. “Open grass, trees, water, many dogs. Lots of colour _217a36_.”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Éponine replies. She turns to Marius. “Good work on base knowledge, by the way. You know if this wasn’t _so_ illegal, we could make a good living off it, you and I.”

“Thanks,” Marius says, blushing a bit. It’s almost charming. Cosette will grow to like that, Éponine realizes. She shifts. The realization doesn’t exactly sit right in her stomach.

“I don’t mind being illegal,” says Cosette. “It feels...brave.”

Cosette’s showing a face to her that Marius definitely hasn’t programmed in. (Feisty, Éponine thinks).

“Huh,” she says. “You’re definitely ready to go out.”

\--

They do take her to the park. Marius takes her arm, like some kind of old-fashioned gentleman. Cosette doesn’t seem to get the message and takes Éponine’s arm with her free one. Éponine looks at Marius for a course of action, but he just shrugs. He looks a little lost without the laptop, honestly.

Cosette lets go of their arms and makes a beeline for the pond when they get there. There’s a family of ducklings paddling towards the shore, and she sticks her full hand in the water in front of them.

Marius makes a move to stop her, but Éponine holds him back. “Don’t worry,” she says. “All the electronics are waterproofed.”

He relaxes. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

They both watch Cosette in silence for a moment. She’s crouched down, and the hem of the blue dress is slipping into the pond. The ducks swim warily around her.

“How can I ever repay you?” asks Marius. “I mean. I know I already paid you, but. Look what you’ve done here.” He gestures vaguely in Cosette’s direction.

She elbows him. “Both of us, not just me. And honestly I think she’s taken on somewhat of a life of her own.”

“I designed her to,” he admits. “She has to have some kind of free will.”

She looked at him, shocked. “Wouldn’t expect that from you.”

“I _said_ I wanted someone to talk to, ‘Ponine. Anyway, I’m serious. If there’s something else I can do, tell me.”

Éponine thinks for a second. “Yeah, I got something. Courf. Set him up with some more of whatever this is.”

He grins, “I hoped you would ask,” he says.

Cosette turns back around, meets Éponine’s eyes, and grins. She’s holding a duck.

Éponine just laughs, and it doesn’t _matter_ that she’ll have to send Cosette off with Marius in a few days (she was never yours to begin with, she thinks), because she gets this moment right here, and for now that’s enough.

\--

After Marius goes home, she goes to power down Cosette for the night, but Cosette stops her hand on the way to the switch.

“Can I stay up with you?” Cosette asks.

Éponine blinks. “Yeah, of course. I was just gonna clean up the shop a bit, though.”

“That’s alright. I’ll just watch.” Cosette plops herself down in a chair, and does just that.

Éponine neatens wires, switches off the extra lights, and sweeps the floor of the silicon bits still left there from week one. She carries the sleeping Courf to his spot on the bench against the wall. Occasionally, she sneaks glances at Cosette, who smiles when their eyes meet. Éponine quickly looks away each time.

She definitely doesn’t think about the way Cosette smiles, or laughs in C053773, or says the word _beautiful_ , or the way she held a duck, or how she didn’t let go of her hand. She doesn’t think about the way she dropped Éponine’s old coveralls with a flutter of eyelashes that, in hindsight, may have been deliberate. Most of all she doesn’t think about the fact that she knew from the beginning of this job exactly how it would end, but she let herself feel like this anyway.

But who could have expected it? She knew Marius was designing the perfect woman, but now the perfect woman has will and feelings and _agency_ that are so, so human, and there’s absolutely nothing she could have done.

“Are you alright?” Cosette asks, shaking her out of her stupor.

“Uh,” Éponine says, in place of an answer.

“You’re gripping the broom so tight you might break it.”

She looks at her hands. Her knuckles are white.

“Here,” Cosette says.

Cosette gets up out of her chair and strides towards her. She gently takes Éponine’s hands in her own, unwrapping them from the broom. She lets it clatter to the ground, as Cosette begins to rub small circles on the backs of her hands. Éponine closes her eyes.

“I know what I was made for,” Cosette says, after a while. It sounds almost tentative.

“Are you okay with it?” Éponine asks.

“I thought I was.”

Éponine looks at her quizzically. “Do you not like Marius?”

“I like him just fine, I just…” she trails off and sighs. “I’d rather make my own choices. Now that I’m here, and all.”

“You should be allowed,” Éponine says, and her knuckles grow tight again. “Now that you’re here, you should be allowed to choose to do whatever you want.”

“Can I choose something right now?”

“Anything. Of course.”

Cosette nods, meets Éponine’s eyes, and kisses her.

Éponine freezes. Cosette’s still holding her hands. She’s glued to the spot, her thoughts flying wildly, so fast she can’t even stop one for long enough to hear what it’s saying. She feels nothing but the soft contact of Cosette’s lips, and something in the back of her mind is screaming but she just melts into it, closes her eyes, and kisses back.

After what could have been seconds or minutes, Cosette pulls away. “Thank you,” she says. “If I have to be reprogrammed for this, I’m glad I could do that first.” Cosette smiles, and it breaks Éponine’s heart.

She doesn’t head home. She unrolls a sleeping bag that she keeps in the back of the shop for late nights, and slides in with Cosette. She doesn’t power Cosette down, but Cosette closes her eyes and lays there in some semblance of sleep anyway. Éponine rests, knowing she’s absolutely going to regret this in the morning, but right now she doesn’t particularly care. She sleeps, and when she wakes up it’s with Cosette tucked neatly under her chin. She gently powers her down, and lets her rest.

\--

“I can’t, Marius,” she says, the second Marius walks through the door that morning. “I’ll give you the money back, fuck, I cannot afford that but I can’t give her up.”

Marius is holding his laptop bag to his chest, and just stands there stunned. “What?”

“I like her. _Properly_ like her, not just as a friend or whatever. She grew a goddamn will of her own, and she’s her own person now, and I like her.”

Marius takes in the workshop: the messy sleeping bag in a corner, the broom that Éponine left where it fell on the floor yesterday. “What. What happened last night?”

“She kissed me. She did it because she’s scared you’re going to reprogram her, and I cannot let you do that.”

Marius blinks, once. He silently brushes past her, sits down in a chair, and leans his head on a shelf.

“Marius?” she says.

Silence.

“Well, okay. I won’t power her on until you’re ready.”

Éponine starts cleaning up the abandoned mess. He’ll take some time to work through it.

\--

“I won’t reprogram her,” Marius says, two hours later, and Éponine just about jumps out of her skin. “But I have to know how this happened. Let me talk to her, then let me work on Courfeyrac.”

Éponine lets out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Thank you,” she says.

\--

Éponine stands outside while Cosette and Marius talk, at Marius’ request. She imagines it would be embarrassing for all three of them for her to be in the room. And to be honest, she’s not sure she wants to know what he has to say. She realizes, in hindsight, that Marius might tell Cosette how she feels about her. Cosette might not even like her that way, she could have just wanted to try it out. Not that it matters at all how Cosette feels about her, so long as she gets to make her own choices. That’s enough right? Of course it is. But still, she hopes it was more than that. She paces the floor outside the workshop wondering if she’s made a horrible, horrible mistake.

After a little while, the door creaks open. Éponine whirls around to see Cosette poking her head out.

“Éponine?” she says, tentatively.

“Did Marius tell you what I said?”

“That’s what I came out to ask.”

Éponine peers past Cosette into the shop. Marius is setting up his laptop and powering up Courf, without so much as a cursory glance at the door. “Um,” she says. “Listen. What matters to me is that you get to make your own decisions here. When me and Marius started this, we- I didn’t think you’d get so far along in the free will department. What I want with you doesn’t particularly matter, if it’s not what you want.”

She means it, and she knows it’ll be fucking soul-crushing when Cosette decides to leave, but it’s for the best because she has no right to control or decide what-

“I love you,” Cosette says, interrupting her train of thought. “And I know I’m using that word correctly.”

“You barely know me,” Éponine says weakly. “I think I love you too, but we barely know each other.”

“I’ve known you my whole life,” Cosette replies. And. Wow, she’s not wrong, but that’s a wild thought.

“You’re beautiful and kind and pick up ducks in the park and know some ancient code for the colour of grass,” Éponine says, “Why me?”

“You’re beautiful, and you’re smart, and brave enough to do something quite illegal for your friend, who is a mad scientist. I have a small library of information in my head and you’re a book I would very much like to keep reading.”

“Fucking hell,” Éponine says, because she’s never been all that good with words. “Can I kiss you?”

Cosette laughs, and it’s still similar to the C053773 laugh Éponine was infatuated with on the first day she heard it, but it’s different, somehow. It has a life of its own now. She wouldn’t change it for the world. “Please,” she says.

So she does.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, merelydovely, thank you so much for this prompt! It was a buck-wild concept that I loved immediately and was so much fun to write. I hope you enjoyed it. It ended up running double the length I originally planned, but well. That happens sometimes. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! You can find me [here](https://grantairelibere.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.


End file.
